Generating Electricity with Stepper Motors

All sorts of scrapped and secondhand devices can be used to

generate your own electricity. Car alternators are an obvious
one if you want to charge 12 Volt batteries. Small permanent
magnet motors such as radiator fan motors or cassette
recorder motors are easy to use as they produce DC power
directly without any external circuits like rectifiers or control
boxes.
There is another type of electric motor worth considering - the
small stepper motors used in old computer printers. They are
quite small and aren't suitable for producing more than a few
Watts, but there are good reasons for looking at them. For a
start, the lunatic speed at which computer equipment goes
obsolete means there are enormous numbers of them
available free. Unlike small DC motors, steppers will generate
power at very low rotation rates; typically only about 200 rpm
for a good output which is ten or fifteen times slower than the
rate for a DC motor. Small scale generators to run things like
computer games or flashlights can be made without
mechanical complications like gearing. Because of their small
size they're obviously not suitable for charging large batteries.
Better applications would be pocket sized generators to
convert things like Walkmans and MP3 players to wind-up
power, saving the waste and pollution of chemical batteries.
Another possibility is small wind generators as the low rpm
needed means a propeller could be mounted directly on the
motor shaft. (Actual gears in a wind generator are generally a
disaster - the whining noise is amplified by the blades and
spreads over a wide area because of the height).
The present generation of printer motors are admittedly not
large, and in fact are getting smaller as the old daisywheel and
dot matrix printers are replaced by inkjets and smaller lasers.
It is definitely worth experimenting with them though, as it is
likely that the next generation of domestic appliances will be
heavily computerised, and so full of nice big steppers. Anyone
who has acquired experience on the small ones will be able to
make these into some really nice generators.
Selecting Suitable Motors
Old Dot Matrix computer printers (the larger and older the
better) contain at least two steppers. Usually one drives the
roller and another moves the print head back and forth.
Daisywheel printers will also have one to turn the daisywheel
which can be a bit inaccessible but worth the effort. Tiny
steppers were also sometimes used to wind the ribbon and in
colour printers another minute one moved a striped ribbon up
and down. Disc drives tend to be a bit disappointing - often the
motors are built into the drive hub and contain some
electronics so you can't get easy access to the coil
connections. Really old 5.25" floppy drives contain a nice
motor used to move the reading head back and forth - it's a lot
more useful than the one for turning the disc which was
sometimes a DC motor on older ones and tangled into the
circuit board on later models. Very old hard drives (on 286 or
386 computers and less than 100M) use a small stepper to
move the head array. Modern hard drives use an analogue
galvanometer instead; it contains a pair of amazingly strong
magnets - mind your fingers if you extract them! Physically
large motors like the single ones which drive laser printers are
obviously more powerful than small ones; anything less than
an inch in diameter is probably only suitable for running a few
LED's. They're OK for educational purposes or making
illuminated things for playing with at chill-outs. (See the page
on making Hub Disc Twirly Things)

Steppers come with different resolutions. Virtually all steppers

are either 1.8° or 7.5° per step; (200 steps or 48 steps per
revolution) the difference can be felt easily if you turn the
spindle by hand. The 1.8° ones are obviously better for
generating at really low revs, but also 'top out' lower. The coils
in steppers have a relatively large inductance, and beyond a
certain speed the output frequency gets so high that the
impedance of the coils starts to become significant and limits
the current. When making a stepper based generator, you
need to keep the motor speed to around a couple of hundred
revs per minute - something like the normal speed of a bicycle
wheel.
Apart from printers, plenty of other things contain steppers.
Scanners, shredders, faxes and photocopiers are also worth
checking out. Be careful with things like copiers and laser
printers not to get toner all over your workshop, especially if it
doubles as your living room! Don't vacuum clean toner as the
particles are so small they'll go through the bag into the air.
Wash it off with water or clean it up with a damp cloth. Really
large steppers are found in automated industrial equipment
and the large tape drives used with old mainframe computers
which you might still find at auctions. The next generation of
highly automated washing machines and dishwashers,
household robots etc. will contain some nice big steppers, and
it won't be too long before they are superseded and start to
turn up at the rubbish tips and car boot sales. There's already a
nice example of this in New Zealand where Fisher and Paykel
have been selling stepper-driven washing machines for some
years, and scrapped ones have been made into neat hydro
generators by a local company appropriately called
Ecoinnovation. The 20cm diameter motor in the Smart Drive
washing machine is an example of the nice big motors just
around the corner.

What's Inside a Stepper Motor

In the early days of DIY renewable energy, it was popular to
make small wind generators out of bicycle wheels containing
Sturmey Archer Dynohubs. Now almost a museum piece, they
were the predecessor of the bottle shaped rim 'dynamo'. (I
don't know what was the matter with the people who named
these things - they were both ALTERNATORS producing AC; the
term dynamo is better used for generators incorporating a
synchronised contact breaker turning the output into DC.
Maybe it was something to do with marketing) Anyway, the
Dynohub was a small multi-pole alternator in the hub of either
the front or rear wheel with an internal resistance of 6 Ohms
and capable of generating 6 Volts when turned at 60 rpm. The
performance wasn't that good - the internal resistance means
that if you took a current of half an Amp from it the voltage
would have dropped to only 3 Volts. In spite of this, many
people made wind generators out of them by sticking blades in
the spokes, rectifying the AC with a bridge rectifier and putting
them on the roof of their caravan or bus to trickle charge
batteries.
Stepper motors are also a small multi-pole alternator, but
being more modern they have four phases while the old
Dynohub had only one. In use, the computer puts a pulse of
current into each phase coil in turn, moving the shaft on one
step. As with a DC permanent magnet motor, turning the
motor's shaft makes it work backwards, causing pulses of
current to come out of the windings. However, the current is
AC, going plus as a magnet pole approaches a coil and then
minus as it goes away again. Usually there are four phases at
90 degree intervals so when one comes down to zero, the next
one has reached maximum. This is a benefit as it means the
output can be rectified to produce much smoother DC with
hardly any gaps, but it means they have a scarily large number
of wires coming out. Luckily it's quite easy to figure out which
way around they are using a resistance meter (preferably
digital), and getting them the wrong way around won't do any
damage. The most common type of stepper has six wires
coming out. (There are also five, four and eight wire versions;
I'll come to those later - they are easy to understand once
you've sussed the six wire one) The six wire stepper is actually
two motors on one shaft, so the six wires can immediately be
separated into two groups of three. Each group will have some
connection to each other, but no connection to any of the other
group. In each group, one wire is the common and the other
two are the opposite ends of a winding which will give out
oppositely phased AC.
In terms of resistance, the reading from the common to either
end will be half the reading across the two ends. Having found
the common on one set, you can use the same process to find
the common in the other one. All four windings will have
almost exactly the same resistance.
The majority of steppers are six wire, but there are other
varieties. Five wire ones are easy; the two commons on the six
wire have already been connected together for you which
makes things easier. Eight wire ones are just like a six wire but
with all the windings separate, and four wire ones are half of
an eight wire one (or half a six wire one with the two windings
separate).

There's more than one way to wire up the stepper to get a DC

output. Unlike the dynohub, you can't wire it up to a bulb and
run it off AC as it's got four separate phases and connecting
any two directly will cause a short and stall it. On the other
hand, if you're bursting to generate some power, connecting a
small light bulb, say 6V 100 mA from ONE of the live phases to
the common and turning the spindle with your fingers should
get a result. It's quite a good way to find out if you're going to
get a useful amount of power out of it, but you'll only get a
quarter of the possible power that way. The simplest way to
wire it up is to link the two commons to the minus terminal and
then connect each of the four live phases through a small
diode to the plus one as shown. Here's what it looks like.

The four lives will each go positive (and then negative) one
after the other like the cylinders of a car firing and the diodes
collect together all the positive pulses and feed them out.
Because of the overlapping phases, the rectified AC never goes
down to zero like it would from a normal bridge rectifier.
Putting the bulb across the output should give a stronger result
than before and a DC voltmeter will show that the output
voltage is more or less proportional to the rotation speed. This
is normal for a permanent magnet alternator and you will need
to use a regulator limit the voltage. Because the stepper is
acting as an AC generator, it doesn't matter which way you
turn it so designs in which it is turned alternately forward and
back by a treadle or foot pedal are possible.

If the motor you've got is rated at 5V but you want to generate

enough voltage to charge a 12V battery, you can often get
away with just spinning it a bit faster. If that doesn't work, you
may be better off using this voltage doubler circuit with two
bridge rectifiers. I've built a pedal generator which can be
switched between the two configurations, and there's less
difference between them than you'd expect. The double
voltage configuration gives a good voltage at lower speeds but
has less current capability as there's twice the winding
resistance. The normal four diode setup gives more current
when driven faster, but not twice as much as the AC
impedance of the windings has an effect due to the higher
frequency.